PRLog (Press Release) –
Apr 22, 2008 – Catalog marketing beats retail marketing—again. Between 2001 and 2006 the annual compounded growth rate for catalog sales was 5.95%. Those figures show that the catalog industry has grown 25% faster than brick & mortar retail that had a compounded annual growth rate of only 4.08% for the same years.
John Schulte, President of the National Mail Order Association (NMOA) expects this growth to continue well into the future. “The U.S. population is full of baby boomers with money in their pocket; this demographic grew up with mail order and catalog shopping, so they are very familiar and comfortable with remote shopping and ordering, and they have little trouble adapting to web catalogs to shop,” says Schulte.
“So here you have the giant baby boomer market using print and web catalogs, and then you have tens of millions of young people growing up using web catalogs, it doesn’t take a genius to predict a bright future for the direct marketing industry.” he adds.
This many shoppers chalk up big sales; while impossible to pinpoint exactly, the NMOA puts Catalog and Mail Order sales at over $400 Billion in yearly sales. And these catalogs make good customers for other companies as well. All sorts of companies use the National Directory of Catalogs to find qualified leads to market their products and services to. Printers, paper suppliers, creative services, software and web developers, mailing services, data management companies, even product manufacturers cater to the catalog industry.
Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, publisher of the National Directory of Catalogs reports that the top 10 catalog categories this year are, Books, Apparel, Automotive, Education, Gardening, Gifts, Food, Religion, Home and Sports. There has been big growth in the number of religion catalogs, jumping from 205 to 329 (60.5% growth), in the last five years. At the same time, automotive catalogs increased from 389 to 593 (52.4%), and education catalogs from 400 to 528 (32%), during the same time period.
The National Directory of Catalogs is the largest directory of U.S. and Canadian catalogs with listings for business and consumer catalogs. Catalog listings include address, phone, fax, URL, email, product line, owner/president, distribution, and printing specs. Available immediately from the National Mail Order Association (NMOA) online bookstore or by calling 612-788-4197, The 2008 National Directory of Catalogs is priced at $945 for the print edition. People needing only certain sections of the directory can also purchase portions electronically at the NMOA website.
